Well I mentioned I’ll share my thoughts on this rich client toolkit when I finally find some time and I guess there is no better time than now.
So after putting it through its paces for more than a year, here are some of my thoughts on it.
For use in or as an enterprise grade application, there would need to be quite a bit of work done to provide the plumbing infrastructure. And it is substantially different from the usual Internet applications and its AJAX-enabled brethens.
So there is a need to understand its quirks and constraints and handle them accordingly.
Also, don’t expect blazing performance. Unfortunately, once the pages becomes more complicated the rendering tends to slow its down substantially. The generated HTML elements are rather heavy.
The good news is that the newer browser versions do speed it up substantially as well. But the browsers that are suppported are constrained by the version of the toolkit that you use.
Unfortunately, newer versions may break the application instead of having it degrade gracefully – as in still usable but not looking so nice.
Support also unfortunately isn’t that great – the community isn’t that big and the company’s official support is extremely expensive and you may or may not get real mileage out of that.
That said, the newer versions do add significant features – some of them similar to what we had to build ourselves as we were using an earlier version.
As in all situations, whether this toolkit is for you depends on your context. But you should always go in with your eyes open.
Filed under: IT Architecture, Design and Programming
